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Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700 - Hardcover

 
9780812250213: Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812250214 ISBN 13: 9780812250213
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In late medieval and early modern Europe, definitions of blood in medical writing were slippery and changeable: blood was at once the red fluid in human veins, a humor, a substance governing crucial Galenic models of bodily change, a waste product, a cause of corruption, a source of life, a medical cure, a serum appearing under the guise of all other bodily secretions, and—after William Harvey's discovery of its circulation—the cause of one of the greatest medical controversies of the premodern period. Figurative uses of "blood" are even more difficult to pin down. The term appeared in almost every sphere of life and thought, running through political, theological, and familial discourses.

Blood Matters explores blood as a distinct category of inquiry and draws together scholars who might not otherwise be in conversation. Theatrical and medical practice are found to converge in their approaches to the regulation of blood as a source of identity and truth; medieval civic life intersects with seventeenth-century science and philosophy; the concepts of class, race, gender, and sexuality find in the language of blood as many mechanisms for differentiation as for homogeneity; and fields as disparate as pedagogical theory, alchemy, phlebotomy, wet-nursing, and wine production emerge as historically and intellectually analogous. The volume's essays are organized within categories derived from medieval and early modern understanding of blood behaviors—Circulation, Wounds, Corruption, Proof, and Signs and Substances—thereby providing the terms through which interdisciplinary and cross-period conversations can take place.

Contributors: Helen Barr, Katharine Craik, Lesel Dawson, Eleanor Decamp, Frances E. Dolan, Elisabeth Dutton, Margaret Healy, Dolly Jørgensen, Helen King, Bonnie Lander Johnson, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Joe Moshenska, Tara Nummedal, Patricia Parker, Ben Parsons, Heather Webb, Gabriella Zuccolin.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow, Lecturer, and Director of Studies at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge and author of Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture. Eleanor Decamp is author of Civic and Medical Worlds: Performing Barbery and Surgery.

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Introduction
Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp

This book emerges from a concern, shared by a number of medieval and early modern scholars across the world, that "blood" was and is a word whose copious signifying capacities remain desperately underexamined. Frequently conjured on stage and in the printed word as both literal substance and figurative description, "blood" rarely appears to be drawn from a single, shared historical interpretation. What exactly did our medieval and early modern predecessors define as the red stuff that runs in human veins? And just how vast was blood's potential application in figurative descriptions of the human condition?

Medical and social historians of the medieval and early modern periods are increasingly locating blood as a rich and complex area of inquiry; recent individual works, each devoted to one of blood's many functions, have focused on the role blood played in Galenic thought, in the intersection between familial networks, gender, childcare, and reproduction, and in women's health in both early modern England and France. Hannah R. Johnson and Jean E. Feerick have examined blood and race in medieval blood libels and early modern colonialism; Louise Noble and Richard Sugg have unearthed early modern literature's interest in blood as a medicinal substance; and Bettina Bildhauer's interest in medieval German approaches to blood is wide-ranging. All of these studies draw on work by Caroline Walker Bynum and Gail Kern Paster—and this collection is no less indebted. Bynum's Wonderful Blood (2007) has ensured that for medievalists blood is now a crucial consideration when thinking about literary and cultural constructions of gender, race, holiness, devotion, and the body. And Gail Kern Paster's The Body Embarrassed (1993) guaranteed that a generation of early modern scholars are attuned to the historical reality of the humoral body.

It should come as no surprise that blood is emerging as a central concern for scholars working in the medieval and early modern periods; it was in these centuries that blood underwent some of its most significant and lasting conceptual transformations. Definitions of blood in Western European medical writing ca. 1400-1700 were slippery and changeable: blood was at once the red fluid in human veins, a humor, a fluid governing crucial Galenic models of bodily change such as plethora and purging, a waste product, a cause of corruption, a source of life, a medical cure, a fluid appearing under the guise of all other bodily fluids, and (after William Harvey's discovery of its circulation) blood caused the seventeenth century's greatest medical controversy. However, the period's many figurative uses of "blood" are even more difficult to pin down: the term appeared in almost every sphere of life and thought and ran through discourses as significant as divine right theory, doctrinal and liturgical controversy, political reform, and family and institutional organization. Any attempt to trace blood's "lexical unwieldiness" in the literature, drama, and visual arts of the period must therefore grapple with a highly overdetermined sign.

However, recent scholarship on blood in the medieval and early modern periods is not in full conversation. The works mentioned here are separated by both period and discipline. Blood Matters is designed to recognize blood as a distinct category of inquiry and to draw together those scholars developing an expertise in the area who might otherwise not be in dialogue. The nature of blood, as a substance and an idea, requires interdisciplinarity; blood touches and is codified by every area of human experience. But it also demands an interperiod approach, especially where the years 1400-1700 are concerned. These centuries proved crucially transformative for those discursive sites in which blood played a key role: Eucharistic controversy, anatomical cultures, Counter-Reformation piety, the emergence of nation-states and colonialism, and the rise of primogeniture.

Charting the full range of blood's meanings in the history of European thought will be an ongoing project, requiring the expertise of scholars from a variety of disciplines and periods. This book is offered as the first wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study of blood in Western Europe ca. 1400-1700, bringing together historians, literary scholars, and drama specialists. In this volume theatrical practice and medical practice are found to converge in their approach to the regulation of blood as a source of identity and truth; medieval civic life intersects with seventeenth-century science and philosophy; the categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality find in the language of blood as many mechanisms for differentiation as for homogeneity; and fields as disparate as pedagogical theory, alchemical cultures, phlebotomy, wet-nursing, and wine production emerge as historically and intellectually analogous. The breadth of study here is not to demonstrate that blood has a bewildering omnipresence, which defies semantics, logic, and categorization, but to explore how it enables medieval and early modern thinking (and our own) to confront the contradictions and failures of scientific, artistic, and social constructs. And so through our bold intellectualization of blood matters we gain a tool for discourse itself.

Blood Matters takes seriously its interdisciplinary and interperiod agenda. The book seeks in blood's various qualities and behaviors those unifying ideas from which are emerging methodological approaches capable of bridging disciplinary and period divides. Blood is therefore not just the object of our inquiry: its conceptual and semiotic patterns shape individual chapters' analytical approach but also provide the terms through which separate disciplines can converse. Each of the book's five sections (Circulation, Wounds, Corruption, Proof, Signs and Substance) brings together work from at least two distinct specialisms and historical periods.

Circulation

Blood Matters takes as its starting point William Harvey (1578-1657), whose discovery of the circulation of the blood has been seen as marking the beginnings of modern science—not so much through the physiological reality he revealed but rather through the controversial nature of his inquiry, which rejected the early modern medical community's intellectual tradition of philosophical disputation in favor of empirical observation and experimentation. In her chapter on Harvey, Margaret Healy questions the recent critical attempt to read Harvey's discovery as a radical "dethroning" of the heart (and the centralized political authority represented by the heart) in favor of the more dispersed and circulating blood. Arguing that Harvey's anatomical observations were not an expression of commonwealth politics, Healy reveals instead how the language Harvey used to articulate his discovery drew upon a much longer tradition in which circulation and rotation have been used to describe a range of human states and experiences. Like Heather Webb, whose chapter analyses the figurative language of circulation in the writing of Dante and Catherine of Siena, Healy demonstrates how powerful—and how pliable—circulation was, and is, as a metaphor for the organization of human society, the distribution of its goods, and the regulation of its moral health.

By bringing these chapters together with Katharine Craik's study of class, blood-typing, and the circulation of personhood on the Shakespearean stage, Blood Matters interpolates Webb's medieval Italian account of charity's demands on the individual-in-community with the now long-standing New Historicist interest in the rise of the individual and, in so doing, pushes early modern criticism's concern with historical personhood into important areas of inquiry that it has for too long...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812250214
ISBN 13 
9780812250213
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
354
Herausgeber
Johnson Bonnie Lander, Decamp Eleanor
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